


The One Who Vacuums

by Overlithe



Series: Smithsonian Rejects [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes as Captain America, Bucky Cap, Comedy, F/M, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 15:51:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2115759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlithe/pseuds/Overlithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being in a relationship with Bucky Barnes means dealing with all his little foibles. Especially the ones involving compulsive vacuuming. Bucky/Sam, Bucky/Nat, Bucky/Steve (you can read the fic as OT4 if you’d like, or you can read each segment as standing on its own). Gift-fic for muffinbitch.</p><p>Set in the MCU with comics elements.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Who Vacuums

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muffinbitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muffinbitch/gifts).



> Written for muffinbitch as a (very belated) get well present after her surgery, and because she loves these ships, Bucky Cap, and compulsive cleaner!Avengemum!Bucky Barnes every bit as much as I do.
> 
> So, in the comics, Bucky becomes Captain America. More importantly for our purposes, he is also portrayed as a neat freak. Here is the bit in _New Avengers_ in which he arrives home from patrol to find that his team-mates (who live in his house) have made a huge mess of the place, which he seems to take as a personal affront: <http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/overlithe/15266763/255818/255818_original.png> (yes, that is Wolverine passed out on the couch). This is on Thursday. A scene set on Friday shows the kitchen is spotless once again, so the implication is that Captain America spent the following 24 hours in a cleaning frenzy. You can thank me for that mental image later. We then have a scene in which Bucky tries to talk to his team-mates about the mess they’ve been making: <http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/overlithe/15266763/256065/256065_original.png> (Needless to say, this is all in vain because Mum’s attempts to get people to do some chores always go ignored even when Mum is Captain America.) With that out of the way, onwards to the fic…

**The One Who Vacuums**

**1.**

It was almost midnight when they finally found a motel close to what the reports had described as the site of suspicious activity, and Sam was beat. He had certainly gone on more arduous trips ever since his job description had apparently changed to “being a real life super-hero” and “teaming up with Captain America (both of them)”, but there was something about the desert, back roads, and dust that made him want to go to sleep until a city materialised itself. A roadside motel would have to do.

They cased the place for any nasty surprises, checked in, made sure they weren’t needed elsewhere, the usual. The place was quiet. There weren’t even any side-eyeing assholes who couldn’t decide whether to object more to the fact they were both men or the fact they weren’t both white. Once they were in their room, Sam settled on the bed and went over the evidence they’d collected while the television—the motel was in the middle of nowhere but it had HBO, thank God for small mercies—poured out white noise in the background.

Bucky wandered outside for a bit, hands stuffed in his pockets, before stepping back in and studying the room for a while. Sam worried—he always worried—but he did his best to let his boy do what he needed to do. Sam might not have learnt it in the flesh, like Bucky had, but he had seen enough to know about hearing raised voices and having your body think they were coming for you, about dreams in which you ran and ran but someone, _something_ , always managed to track you down. It wasn’t something you could fix or cure, just like you couldn’t regrow a missing arm. You just had to keep going until maybe one day you were lucky enough to find out that it only bothered you as much as a knee that ached when a storm was coming.

Sam planned on being there for every step of the road.

‘Are you coming to bed or—?’ he said as Bucky vanished into the bathroom.

‘Gimme a minute.’

Good. Everything was fine. Sam pulled back the bedcovers, since Bucky preferred the cold despite having a body temperature slightly warmer than the surface of the sun, and settled in.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Half an episode of _Game of Boobs_ had elapsed by the time Sam knocked on the bathroom door. _Stupid, Wilson, very stupid. What if something happened to…_ ‘Buck? You OK?’

‘’m fine. Be right out.’

He didn’t sound fine. The door was unlocked. Sam went in.

Bucky had stripped down to a tank top and his underwear and was sitting on the edge of the shower stall. He was holding a sponge in his metal hand and an old toothbrush in his real one—where did he even _get_ these things?—and, right as Sam walked in, he’d been scrubbing the grouting. Now he stopped, looked up at Sam, and flushed a violent shade of red, as though he’d been just caught doing something horribly illicit, like jerking off to the _Wall Street Journal_.

Well, at least Sam hadn’t kicked the door down as he was bursting in to save the day. There was that.

‘Are you… are you cleaning the shower tiles?’

Bucky seemed to consider that for a moment. ‘… no?’

Sam bit his tongue before he went on. ‘Man, I know you’re literally from the Ice Age, but you do realise that the whole point of motels is that someone else cleans, right?’

‘Yeah, you do realise that we’re the ones who’ll actually be using the shower, right?’

Sam sighed. ‘Can we please go to bed now?’

‘Hey, don’t come crying to me if you get staph from the death bathroom, buddy,’ Bucky grumbled.

Sam made a point of standing in the doorway as Bucky put everything away, picked up his neatly folded clothes, and stepped back into the bedroom.

A while later their bodies were entwined on the bed and all was right with the world. Sam planted a trail of kisses up Bucky’s neck, ran his tongue over the other man’s jawline. ‘I got ya,’ he whispered into Bucky’s skin.

‘I know. Love you.’

Bucky’s warm hand moved, teasingly slow, from Sam’s waist to his chest, then back down again. Sam leaned in for a kiss. Bucky’s mouth parted for him, but there was something…

Sam pulled back. ‘You’re still thinking about those goddamned tiles, aren’t you?’

‘Did you even _look_ at them?’

Sam lay back on the pillows. If he let himself start laughing, he knew he was never going to stop. Emergency services might have to get involved. Hill might have to send in a team.

He reached for Bucky’s hand. Bucky squeezed back.

‘Did you at least bring any extra sponges?’ Sam finally managed to ask.

Sometimes love was having each other’s back. Sometimes it was laughing together at bad movies. Sometimes it was hearing someone cry and just being there, knowing there was nothing you could say or do. Sometimes it was catching someone when they fell.

And sometimes it was scrubbing bathroom tiles at one a.m.

At least they did get to use the shower afterwards.

Bucky only managed a few moments of being insufferably smug before Sam shut him up.

:=:=:=:

**2.**

Natasha was a woman who had long since acknowledged and become attuned to her particular tastes. As such, she was unsurprised when she felt a lick of heat in her lower belly when James leaned down to clean a coffee spill.

‘I’ll get that before it stains,’ he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. In that position his shirt tightened against his back muscles, and his jeans hugged his buttocks like they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.

 _Nice_ , she thought, and made a mental note of some things she might tell him to do later.

Some time after that, she arrived from a very interesting outing involving a frank exchange of views with a certain arms dealer to find James on all fours in the apartment’s living room, a bucket and a bottle of cleaning fluid by his side.

At first she didn’t quite understand what he was doing. She was sure she had never scrubbed a floor in her life. Well, not unless the words “eliminating trace evidence” were involved.

‘Hey,’ he said, and dipped the scrubber in the bucket. ‘Are you OK? Do you need—?’

‘What? No, it all went fine,’ she added, lacquer-smooth as ever. She still wasn’t used to having someone ask her how she was without prodding for where she’d been or what she’d been doing. ‘Caught a lot of bad guys while I was away?’

‘A few,’ he said, and kept on scrubbing.

‘Shouldn’t you be using a mop or something?’

‘I guess I’m just an old-fashioned kinda guy.’

God, he was wearing even fewer clothes than during the Sexy Coffee Spill incident, and these were all every bit as tight. She sat down on the sofa.

‘Sorry, am I in your way?’ he said. Concern, the kind without a catch on the end. She wasn’t very used to that either.

‘No, you do your thing.’

She leaned back in the sofa and watched him work. She could ask him to take off all his clothes, or work hard enough for his skin to glisten with sweat, or tell him to pour some of the water over himself. And he, for all his strength, would do it, without hesitation or complaint, for no other reason than she’d asked him to. Not fear. Not power. Trust.

Actually, he might refuse to pour the water. It could leave a mark on the floor.

She issued no orders, though, content to just sit back and watch his muscles ripple and tighten as he worked the scrubber across the floor in slow, almost languorous motions. A lock of his hair fell down to his eyes and he half-straightened up to push it away with the artificial fingers.

Fortunately, she had small hands, so she only had to undo the top two buttons of her jeans.

***

After that, she developed an inexplicable inability to see mess. She would leave clothes on the floor for him to pick up. Forget to empty the bins. Let dishes pile up in the sink. The fact that her sole apron was three sizes too small for him and the ones he bought kept mysteriously disappearing was, of course, pure coincidence.

‘You know I can tell you’re doing this on purpose, right?’ he said as he moved to clean up the condensation from the coffee table. She had unaccountably forgotten to use a coaster for her cold drink.

‘Are you complaining?’

‘No ma’am,’ James said with a shit-eating grin. He didn’t stop wiping the table.

‘There’s some… stuff I want to use on you,’ she said. ‘While you clean for me. Would you like that?’

He grin deepened, as she knew it would, because as it came to men she certainly had a type, then faded a little.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Nothing that’ll make a mess.’

***

_Hope you dont take 2 long to get home_

Natasha answered the text. _Shopping. U’d better not be wearing anything when i get back._

_Cant wait. Love you ♥_

Well, at least James had gone back to a more subdued texting style since he’d finally got the Emoji 2 Package app out of his system. Never again the tiny panda sprite times.

She put her phone back in her jacket’s pocket and loped down the aisle. She didn’t tell James everything she did, but this time she really was shopping, and not to keep tabs on a target or shake a tail, either. Well, not to do _just_ that. Supermarkets had become a lot more interesting since she’d discovered the erotic possibilities of Dawn Power Dissolver.

She hoped she wouldn’t end up having to think of baseball every time she read the words _Kills 99.9% of germs!_ , though.

Outside, her target got into a car. She found herself thinking that she could pick him up later. He wasn’t that important, much less that clever.

She had been right about love. It made you want to go to a place where there’d be hot tea and ironed sheets and cuddling on the bed watching bad cartoons and holding each other as you slept, like you were fighting back to back again. It convinced you that wanting that didn’t make you an idiot and a fool. It made you grow comfortable, blunted your edges. Suddenly, you had something to lose.

The car started to pull away.

It was worth it.

She pulled out her phone, texted _Love u too_ , and made her way home.

:=:=:=:

**3.**

There were a few things Steve Rogers disliked about the 21st century, but having to specify which almost-end-of-the-world you were talking about was definitely in the top three. That, and people who used their phones during movie screenings. Deep down, he couldn’t help but suspect the two things were somehow connected.

At least this time New York had been spared the fighting and the wounded. He had been starting to think he brought the place bad luck.

Bucky was silent for the whole flight back home. After they landed neither of them bothered to change out of the costumes. Instead they just put on overcoats, like characters from a really terrible spy movie. It didn’t really matter, Steve thought as they made their way home. The streets were full of people who had come out to watch the skies, to watch the news filling every Times Square screen. He doubted anyone would notice him and Bucky even if they were running around naked and holding sparklers.

Well, they might notice the sparklers.

Maybe the naked part too.

He walked past a woman who clearly hadn’t had a chance to change out of her soiled scrubs. One of her two little girls was asleep in her arms, indifferent to the hubbub around her.

What happened after the end was that you got to live.

The house was as they’d left it when they’d got the alert: plates still on the table, clothes strewn on the bed. A window had been left open, and a pigeon had clearly flown in at some point and left a frankly unflattering review of the decor.

He soon realised that Bucky had stayed behind in the hallway, looking at the small mirror on one of the walls. Bucky didn’t care for mirrors, not anymore, but Steve could tell it wasn’t his face he was looking at. He was looking at the costume, the stripes, the white star emblazoned on his chest.

Steve could feel his unhappiness as though it were his own.

‘You can stare all you want, Bucky,’ he said. ‘You’re still stuck with that mug forever.’

‘Thanks, jerk.’

‘You’re welcome, punk.’

That wasn’t enough. It helped, but it wasn’t enough. Steve stepped up to him and put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder.

‘It suits you, you know,’ he said. ‘The costume.’

Bucky didn’t answer. What he saw in the mirror, Steve knew, wasn’t Captain America. He didn’t see someone who was selfless and kind and brave.

Steve would have to convince him it was all true. For the rest of his life, if he had to. Even when he had nothing, he had Bucky. He would never be able to say he had everything if he didn’t have Bucky too.

‘You saved the world today,’ Steve added.

‘We.’ Bucky looked at Steve’s eyes in the mirror, then turned his face away. ‘Not everyone.’

He wasn’t talking about just today.

‘You would have, if you could. I know you, Buck. And I know there’s always something. It doesn’t matter if it’s Hydra, or rogue Asgardians, or aliens, or just a bully who won’t pick on someone his own size. There’s always someone who thinks the way to be strong is to hurt the weak. And what matters is that there are people who’ll stand up to them. Someone who’ll say “not on my watch”. “Not while I’m around”. I know what you’re going to say, someone like me. But… someone like you too.’

Bucky turned to face him.

‘Did you rehearse that, Commander Rogers? Sorry—Captain Rogers?’

Steve looked down at his own costume. ‘This was just for today. I know now more than ever that you’re the man to wield the shield. You’re Captain America.’ He paused. ‘Yeah, I rehearsed it a little bit.’

‘Gonna have to get used to you being the boss,’ Bucky said with a small grin. ‘Like, with an office and everything.’

Steve’s hand hadn’t left Bucky’s shoulder, and now his grip had gone from a gentle squeeze to a caress.

‘I’m going to make an executive decision that we should get out of these costumes,’ he said.

‘Sounds good, boss.’

They made it as far as the living room couch, where they landed in a tangle of stars and stripes. Steve was sure this was probably a major flag code violation, but right now he didn’t care. Bucky’s costume clung to the contours of his body as though it had been painted on. Steve ran a hand over Bucky’s thigh, up his back, pulled him closer so he could deepen the kiss.

What Bucky’s hands were doing was _definitely_ a flag code violation.

Still, a small part of his mind couldn’t help but think of the dirty laundry, the dishes with their abandoned salad furry with mould.

Waking up to vacuuming noises at 3 a.m.

He pulled back. He knew what Bucky needed right now. ‘What do you say we first clean this place up a little?’

Bucky brightened like a diamond shining in the dark.

‘Gee, Rogers, you really know how to show a fella a good time.’

**++The End++**

**Author's Note:**

> For readers not familiar with the comics, in the Siege of Asgard storyline, Steve and Bucky do fight side by side as Captain America and Captain America (for instance: <http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/overlithe/15266763/244850/244850_original.png> or <http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/overlithe/15266763/245670/245670_original.png>) Why? Because it’s freaking awesome, that’s why. So for this fic just imagine something similar with both Captain Americas (Captains America?) happening in the MCU. Actually, if that ever happens in the MCU, I’m pretty sure the person responsible can call dibs on one of my kidneys. Also, some of Steve’s lines here about how Bucky should be the one to wield the shield etc are lifted more or less verbatim from the comics. Bucky and Nat’s interactions draw a lot from the comics too, but there aren’t any direct quotes other than the love you/love you too exchange. Oh, and Sam’s “I got ya” comes from this panel which takes place right after Bucky falls off the quinjet during a fight with a bad guy: <http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/overlithe/15266763/256272/256272_original.png> I think the words I am looking for here are “I rest my case”.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this fic at least as much as I enjoyed writing it. Oh, and if by any chance you read my AtLA fics and wandered in, don’t worry, I still plan to continue writing in that fandom. I’m just branching out a bit. :)
> 
> PS: The fic’s title is of course a parody of the (in)famous “I am the one who knocks” line from _Breaking Bad_.
> 
> PPS: Bonus trading card of Bucky Cap doing the laundry in his underwear: <http://superherosquadonline.wikispaces.com/file/view/Captain_America_-_These_Colors_Dont_Run.png/305062256/Captain_America_-_These_Colors_Dont_Run.png>


End file.
